In modern society, as the online shopping market has rapidly grown, a risk of the order information about a customer, particularly, the personal information of the customer, being leaked by a service provider who is provided with various kinds of information related to the customer from an online seller such as a home shopping mall or online shopping mall to handle delivery of a product ordered by the customer has increased significantly.
In addition, as personal information protection-related laws to protect personal information such as personal information about customers are reinforced, the responsibilities of online sellers as well as service providers responsible for a delivery service are increasing.
In order to address these issues, technologies enabling the delivery service to be handled without personal information about the customers being stored in processing systems owned by multiple service providers responsible for the delivery service have been developed.
Such technologies can be applied in various manners. For example, as schematically shown in FIG. 1, individual Internet shopping malls A, B (11, 12) can build their own secure delivery waybill output systems for order information about an orderer a (10), who is a customer, and a partner company 1 (13), which is a provider responsible for delivery work, can access each corresponding output system and output a secure delivery waybill (see FIG. 1(A)). Second, a separate independent hub system 30 for receiving personal information according to the order information about an orderer b (20), who is a customer, from a plurality of Internet shopping malls X, Y (21, 22) and outputting a delivery waybill can be constructed such that a partner company 2 (23), who is a provider responsible for delivery, can access the hub system and output the secure delivery waybill (see FIG. 1(B)).
However, in the case of the aforementioned two methods, when a secondary or lower-level vendor of the shopping mall handles the operation, the upper-level (secondary to N−1-th-level) product suppliers should sequentially assign a right to access the Internet shopping mall system or the secure delivery waybill hub system to the lower-level (tertiary to N-ary) product suppliers. In addition, if there is no account needed for a higher-level product supplier of the corresponding lower-level product supplier to access the electronic delivery waybill system, the lower-level product supplier cannot output the delivery waybill. Further, in both of the aforementioned methods, the personal information about the recipient is printed on a paper delivery waybill, and accordingly there is always a risk of leakage of the printed personal information.
Therefore, there is a need for a method for enabling the third-level to N-ary subordinate product suppliers to output a delivery waybill using subordinate product supplier access accounts registered with the electronic delivery waybill system by the primary product supplier, even if there are no accounts with which the upper-level (second to N−1-th level) product suppliers of the third-level to N-ary subordinate product suppliers can access the electronic delivery waybill system. In addition, there is a need for a method for providing a delivery service without printing personal information about the recipient on a paper delivery waybill.